Is ECC RAM necesarry ?

[JRM]

Hi,

We are planning a new workstation purchase and the choice of the graphic card is the main point, the difference between a Quadro RTX 6000 and a Titan RTX is mainly about the overpriced ECC memory (the diff in frequency and bandwidth is marginal).

Is ECC crucial for Metashape ? Would its absence downgrade the reliability of the outputs ?

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello JRM,

To my mind, if the memory error happens once a year - that's not really a big problem (even if it is not "corrected").  But if errors are happening very frequently, then ECC is just an indication that there's something wrong with the hardware.

As for the GPU choice in general, Quadro cards are considered to be more stable for constant processing load compared to gamer class cards. But if you are not running the processing 24/7, then most likely GeForce and Titan cards would be also fine.

[JRM]

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for the answer, could you elaborate what you mean by "more stable" ? I always been given Quadro cards by my IT depts so I lack comparison points, our workload can reach 24h/7d for weeks. The latest station we ordered was shipped with an RTX 6000, buying two Titan RTX with nvlinks would double the available CUDA cores and memory for the same cost.

Bonus question : do you have any advice on the Tesla T4 ?

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello JRM,

As far as I know, NVIDIA doesn't guarantee the proper work of the gamer class GPUs used for the intense computations.

We haven't tested Tesla T4, but according to the specification and theoretical TFLOPs it's somewhere close to RTX GeForce 2070 Super or RTX Quadro 4000 by performance.

If you decide to go for double RTX TITAN cards I think you shouldn't use SLI as it wouldn't improve the performance.